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President Bush on Thursday is expected to announce plans to create the world's largest marine protected area — a group of remote Hawaiian islands that cover 84 million acres and are home to 7,000 species of birds, fish and marine mammals, at least a quarter of which are unique to Hawaii. The proposed sanctuary encompasses the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, which conservationists describe as the most intact tropical marine region under U.S. jurisdiction. "This an unprecedented win for endangered Hawaiian monk seals, green sea turtles, black-footed albatrosses, tiger sharks, the incredible reef corals in these waters, the people of Hawaii and...

President Bush has created the world's largest marine reserve. Mr. Bush acted to protect an area of the Pacific Ocean that is roughly the size of California. More than 7,000 species of marine life live in a chain of reefs and shoals stretching nearly 2,000 kilometers northwest from the Hawaiian Islands. That ecosystem is now a protected marine area where commercial and sport fishing will be phased out over the next five years. Visitors wishing to dive or take photographs must have a permit and no one will be allowed to remove animals or minerals. President Bush says the move...

WASHINGTON -- The world's largest protected marine area is being created around the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. The archipelago is 1,400 miles long and 100 miles wide. It's home to rare marine mammals, fishes and birds. On Thursday, President George W. Bush is to announce his decision to create the nation's newest national monument. It covers the vast chain of largely uninhabited islands, atolls, coral reef colonies and seamounts. Conrad Lautenbacher, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said the new protected area in Hawaiian waters would dwarf all others. Lautenbacher calls it "the single-largest act of ocean conservation in...

By Diana Leone dleone@starbulletin.com The Western Pacific Fishery Management Council will ask for continued commercial fishing in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, despite a presidential order yesterday that will ban it in a large region declared as a monument, a council member says. Westpac council member Edwin Ebisui said the council thinks fishing is "palatable and consistent with a monument or reserve." "Westpac's position is and has been that the two fisheries going on up there (bottom-fish and pelagic) have been for years absolutely consistent with marine protection," Ebisui, Hawaii member of the council, said yesterday by telephone from a meeting...

By Diana Leone dleone@starbulletin.com President Bush is expected to announce in Washington today that he wants to make the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands a national monument. In doing so, Bush would establish permanent protection for the 1,400-mile-long, 100-mile-wide section of the Hawaiian archipelago and coral reefs, a move that environmental groups, native Hawaiians and others have been seeking for years. "Building on all the work that was done in the last five years under the marine sanctuary process, the president has decided to elevate the designation of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands area to national monument status," said a statement released yesterday...

An unfamiliar but highly appealing side of President Bush showed itself at the White House yesterday. It was Mr. Bush the compassionate conservationist, friend of green sea turtles, seabirds and Hawaiian monk seals, savior of coral reefs and spiny lobsters, creator of the largest ocean sanctuary on the planet. Mr. Bush has made the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands a national monument, putting them under some of the strictest environmental protections the law provides. It was an act of wilderness preservation that, acre for acre, instantly put him into the same league as the conservation-minded presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Jimmy Carter and Bill...